He provides the others with blankets and other necessities, and delights them with the treasures that he steals. The leader of their little group is named Scipio. They survive by stealing food and picking pockets.

Their roommates-Hornet, Mosca, and Riccio,-are homeless kids with nowhere else to go. The brothers are fleeing from an uncaring aunt who would keep Bo at her side like a lapdog and send Prosper to a faraway boarding school. Twelve-year-old Prosper and his little brother, Bo (short for Boniface), live with their friends in an abandoned movie theater deep in Venice. Would I go back and re-read it? Probably not at this stage as I would not want to ruin the childhood magic of this novel. This is one of those children's novels I would recommend for future generations as a fun and interesting fairytale type of novel. Hence the book proposes that children are far more capable than society seems to realise and that at times laws designed to protect appear to entangle. In order to gain power the two brothers run away and the group of thieves hide out in the abandoned cinema away from the confines of the law. The children within this book feel entrapped by the very fact that they are minors within society. This book, as I reflect, is essentially about the idea of empowerment as linked to age. The assignment and the squabbles within the group, added to the hidden secret of the Thief Lord lead to a fascinating conclusion. They are asked to recover a magical artefact for a particular rich individual with no proper knowledge of what this artefact could do. Which all leads into the job they are asked to do with their leader, the masked Thief Lord, at their head. As one reads on one realises that perhaps these thieves are not quite the rogues they would have you believe. At least they appear to be thieves to begin with. The story follows two brothers who have run away to Venice and end up in the company of a group of juvenile thieves living in an abandoned cinema. What is The Thief Lord? It is a fantasy tale and an adventure story combined and set in modern Venice. Yet there are some novels I read as a child that impacted me enough to cause me to read them over again. From the classy literature books (the classics) to the crummy excuses of children's novels thrown into the public libraries to con young readers into believing that they possess quality my reading has been deep and varied.

The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke